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Leadership

Leadership Team

  • Paul Pluschkell – Chief Executive Officer
    Paul Pluschkell is CEO and Founder of Spigit, an enterprise social software provider. Best described as a creator, a strategist and an athlete – both in sports and in business, Paul’s drive and creative spirit have resulted in his track record of establishing and transforming private- and public-sector companies. His success as an entrepreneur began in 1997 when he merged his first company MXNet and took it public. In between starting new companies Paul has served as CTO of Reuters and was President of Broadband for a global telecommunications provider. Paul has 4 children and has managed back to back National Championship Baseball Teams.
  • James Gardner – Chief Strategy Officer
    James Gardner is Chief Strategy Officer at Spigit, having twice been a Spigit customer when he was CTO at the UK’s largest public sector organization, and prior to that, when he was Head of Innovation and Investment at the UK’s largest bank. As a thought leader and innovation practitioner, James has led innovation teams and programs in multiple industries, continents, and cultural settings. In 2009, his team was awarded the prestigious UK Financial Services Innovation Award twice for work with crowd based innovation, and in 2010, he was nominated the most social-media connected financial services executive in Britain. James is the author or three top-selling innovation books, including his 2012 release “Sidestep and Twist”: a controversial reimagining of the way innovation efforts should be constructed to create value. His prior books, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank (2009) and Little Innovation Book (2010) have been sold in more than 40 countries. James blogs regularly at Innovatorinside.com and Spigit.com. Following a Masters degree in Information Science, he was awarded his Doctorate in Innovation Management in Australia, and moved to London a decade later. He presently splits his time between Spigit’s corporate head office in Pleasanton, and visiting and advising clients around the world.
  • Jim Heilig – Executive VP of Sales
    Jim Heilig is the Executive Vice President of Sales for Spigit, bringing 15+ years of sales, general management and business development experience to the team. Inside both publicly traded and privately held organizations, Jim has built and managed businesses taking advantage of the flexibility of software to deliver on enterprise requirements. Jim’s proven solution sales background, combined with his financial market experience, puts him in a unique position to leverage the breadth of the Spigit team and technology, while continuing to drive Spigit’s market leading growth. Jim holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
  • Lisa Purvis – SVP of Product & Research Development
    As SVP Product and Research & Development at Spigit, Lisa is responsible for setting the strategic product roadmap for capabilities and next dimensions of Spigit to ensure that customer needs are addressed, new opportunity spaces are captured, and Spigit maintains and augments its technology leadership position. Lisa’s previous roles in Product Development and R&D at Xerox, IBM, and The Jackson Laboratory provide her with a rich background in intelligent reasoning and analytics, information modeling, personalized and collaborative information workflows, strategic planning, customer-led innovation, and innovation management. She holds 11 issued US patents, has authored 12+ technical publications, and has her PhD from The University of Connecticut, MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and BS from Clarkson University.
  • Cameran Haire – SVP Customer Success
    Cameran Haire is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success and is responsible for building and supporting Spigit’s community of customers. Cameran comes to Spigit with more than 20 years experience in the programming, consulting, professional services and SaaS services. Throughout her career she has successfully developed and grown the implementation services teams of numerous organizations. Prior to Spigit, Cameran has held leadership roles in EDS, KPMG and Cambridge Technology Partners where she focused on providing emerging technology to enterprise customers. In recent years, she headed up services for “new media” companies that provided solutions in a SaaS model. She received her B.S. in Management from San Jose State University.
  • Annie Lawrenson – Interim VP of Marketing
    As VP of Marketing Annie is responsible for strategy, messaging, demand generation and public relations. Previously, Annie served as VP of Innovation Strategy at Spigit where she focused on developing the company’s innovation services framework as well as the company’s initial mobile product offering. Prior to joining Spigit, Annie first earned her stripes in sales before developing an innovation program in the Manufacturing sector. Annie holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and an innovation-focused MBA from the University of California, San Diego, Rady School of Management.
  • Jeff Spencer – VP of SharePoint Strategy
    Prior to joining Spigit as Vice President of SharePoint Strategy, Jeff worked at Microsoft for over eight years as a Global Director in Microsoft Consulting Services managing the Collaborative Decision-Making team. In that role, he was responsible for developing the innovation process management (IPM) solution that Microsoft consulting took to market. He works closely with their largest global customers to identify and deploy innovation strategies. Prior to managing the CDM team, he created and managed the global EPM team that was focused on deploying their project server and portfolio server tools. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jeff was the president of a successful middle tier consulting company for 18 years that focused on deploying Enterprise Project Management Solutions. Jeff holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Production and Operations Management from California State University, Northridge.
  • Daniel Connolly – SVP of Sales for Americas
    Daniel Connolly is Spigit’s Senior Vice President of Sales for Americas. A member of the team since 2009, Daniel has brought his “client first” approach to all areas of customer engagement. Having worked personally on some of Spigit’s most notable clients, he has intimate knowledge of what it takes to ensure their success and create “a culture of innovation” within their organization. In Daniel’s most recent role as VP of Spigit East he established the east coast offices as well as hired and developed the east coast sales force. Daniel joined Spigit with 15+ years of sales and general management experience from both privately held and publicly traded organizations. When he is not traveling to meet with clients, Daniel is based out of the Spigit office in Reston, Virginia where he lives with his bride and two children. He holds a B.A. from Colby College and an M.B.A. from St. Mary’s in Moraga, California.
  • Boris Pluskowski – SVP, Innovation Strategy
    Boris is an acknowledged thought leader and evangelist of corporate Innovation Management, Social Media/Technology and Collaboration. Boris has spent the last 15 years working with senior executives at some of the world’s largest companies, teaching them how to create a sustainable repeatable and value- creating collaborative innovation engine to drive the creation of new products and business models, novel cost reductions, and step-change process improvements. Prior to joining Spigit, Boris was a founding employee of Imaginatik, the company that created the first commercial innovation software platform – where he was in charge of their research arm as well as leading their professional services team. Boris was also previously a part of PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) Strategic Management Consulting practice based in London, focusing on knowledge management and collaboration strategies. Boris is the author of numerous articles and research reports on innovation, collaboration and social media practices, and is the author of the widely read blog, “The Complete Innovator.” Boris has a BSc from Imperial College, London, and an MBA from the Cass School of Business in London.
  • Gary Goelkel – VP of Operations
    As Vice President of Operations, Gary is responsible developing, managing, and supporting our Software as a Service offerings and our own technology infrastructure. He brings over 25 years of software application development, support, and technical operations management experience. Prior to joining Spigit he served 5 years as the VP of Operations at Callidus Software where he created the SaaS platform, established the security program, developed and managed the third party relationships, and built the operations team. For the prior 15 years at Hewlett-Packard, he managed the development and support of the quote to cash applications for the Asia Pacific geography originally starting as a software development engineer. Gary is a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), has extensive service audit experience, and has been a featured speaker at both Oracle World and Gartner events. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Psychology and Management from Eckerd College.
  • Sandeep Tewari – VP of Engineering
    Sandeep Tewari is the Vice President of Engineering at Spigit. He is responsible for all aspects of product development and architecture. Sandeep is an enterprise software veteran with more than 12 years of experience working in engineering management and development positions for start-up companies. Prior to Spigit, Sandeep held engineering management and development roles in NewScale, Informative, NexPrise and Lockheed Martin. Sandeep has 15 years of hands-on experience building scalable web based applications. Sandeep has published papers in the field of Virtual Reality and Computer Graphics. Sandeep holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Texas A&M University with a specialization in Computer Graphics.
  • Lauren Coleman – Senior Designer
    Lauren joined Spigit in 2009, and brings 16 years of experience in print/web design and front-end development to her role as Senior Designer. Her responsibilities have run the gamut from creating marketing collateral, rebuilding the corporate web site, solving UI bugs and building new features, and creating custom branded solutions for Spigit’s customers. Her background includes print and web collateral for corporations, non-profits and academic clients, as well as creating and managing a small design firm. Lauren received her B.A. in Film & Photography from Hollins University.
  • Charles Bergeman – Professional Services Manager
    As the Professional Services Manager, Charles oversees custom branding, reporting, data migration and single sign-on services. Charles has been involved in diverse roles covering software engineering, architecture, UI design, knowledge management, QA, and customer support for more than 30 years. In his 24 year career with Bechtel, he managed a global team of developers developing enterprise software, and employee-facing intranet solutions. While working with Bechtel Investments, he performed technical evaluations of software companies. With his own consulting company he specialized in design and development of rich media web sites including Flash and video. At Fliqz, and subsequently VBrick, (video hosting/streaming companies), Charles provided, customer support, solutions architecture, sample code, test harnesses, QA and documentation. He also participated in video player design, development and deployment strategies.
  • Paul Pluschkell
    Paul Pluschkell is CEO and Founder of Spigit, an enterprise social software provider. Best described as a creator, a strategist and an athlete – both in sports and in business, Paul’s drive and creative spirit have resulted in his track record of establishing and transforming private- and public-sector companies. His success as an entrepreneur began in 1997 when he merged his first company MXNet and took it public. In between starting new companies Paul has served as CTO of Reuters and was President of Broadband for a global telecommunications provider. Paul has 4 children and has managed back to back National Championship Baseball Teams.
  • John R. Hart
    Mr. Hart has served as President and Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the board of directors since 1996. Mr. Hart also serves as an officer and/or director of the following PICO Holdings subsidiaries: Physicians Insurance Company of Ohio (President, Chief Executive Officer, and director since 1993), Vidler Water Company, Inc. (Chairman since 1997 and Chief Executive Officer since 1998), Citation Insurance Company (Chairman since 1996), and Nevada Land and Resource Company, LLC (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer since 1997).
  • Maxim C. W. Webb
    Mr. Webb has been EVP, CFO and Treasurer of PICO since May 2001. Mr. Webb served in various capacities with the Global Equity Corporation group of companies since 1993, including Vice President, Investments of Forbes Ceylon Limited from 1994 through 1996. Mr. Webb became an officer of Global Equity Corporation in November 1997 and Vice President, Investments of PICO in November 1998.
  • Mark Colodny
    Mark M. Colodny joined Warburg Pincus in 2001 and focuses on media, internet and information investments. Previously, he served as senior vice president of corporate development at Primedia where he ran the mergers and acquisitions group. He began his career as a writer at Fortune magazine. Mr. Colodny received an A.B. from Harvard University, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a director of CAMP Systems International, GlobalSpec, MLM Information Services, iParadigms, MultiView, A Place for Mom, EVIDON, eCert, Spigit and OnTargetJobs. Mr. Colodny also leads the firm’s West Coast office.
  • Patrick Severson
    Patrick Severson joined Warburg Pincus in 2001 and focuses on the firm’s investments in software and software enabled businesses. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus, Mr. Severson was a consultant with Booz-Allen & Hamilton and Price Waterhouse, focused on media and technology industries. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Mr. Severson’s current portfolio includes iParadigms, Nuance, Spigit and Telcordia. He has been a director or involved with the firm’s investments in Secure Computing (acquired by McAfee), LSSi (acquired by Volt), Systinet (acquired by Mercury/HP), Pi (acquired by EMC) and Tradecard. Mr. Severson serves as an advisor to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
  • Vishnu Menon
    Vishnu Menon joined Warburg Pincus in 2005 and has been a media and technology investor since 1999. Mr. Menon is based in San Francisco and focuses on investments in the media, data/information, and software sectors. Previously, Mr. Menon worked as a business services and technology investor at New York-based hedge fund Perry Capital and Texas Pacific Group in San Francisco. Prior to that, he was with Symphony Technology Group and JP Morgan Capital. Mr. Menon holds a BA in international relations from Stanford University and has an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the boards of iParadigms and Spigit, and works closely with Yodlee and Workscape.
  • Michael M. Clair
    Michael Clair has spent more than 30 years in successful operating roles with multiple Silicon Valley companies focused on wired and wireless voice and data networking technologies, network and Internet security, as well as network management software solutions. He was a co-founder and Senior VP of Marketing and Sales of SynOptics Communications which became Bay Networks, and held executive positions at Tymshare, and ROLM Corporation. He was Chairman of Intellisync for 9 years as well as a board member at 3PAR and Phoenix Technologies. In addition to Spigit, he currently serves on the boards of NDS Surgical Imaging and VT&T. Mr. Clair has a BS in Finance and Marketing, and an MBA from SUNY at Buffalo in Operations Research. Mr. Clair donates his time and serves on the California Board of the V Foundation for Cancer Research.